Cy-Fair behavioral specialist charged after autistic student dies choking on food

A 16-year-old non-verbal student with autism died after an encounter at Cypress-Fairbanks ISD’s Carlton Pre-vocational Center, and court records now say a district behavioral specialist forcefully and deliberately pushed him.

Donald Cameron Perkins, 50, was charged with injury to a disabled individual, a third-degree felony, and was in custody ahead of a Friday appearance before a Harris County judge. The case has pushed district oversight, staff training and emergency response to the center of a death that happened inside a campus built to serve students with specialized needs.

The incident happened April 23 at the Carlton Pre-vocational Center in Cypress, where officials were called around 8 a.m. to investigate a serious medical emergency involving a student. The boy’s parents told investigators he had been diagnosed with autism at a young age and was essentially non-verbal in daily life, making the way he was handled and supervised especially consequential.

Court documents say Perkins told police he had been summoned to a bus after the student took food from the driver and shoved it into his mouth. He said he then escorted the child to an exterior door and into a classroom. Investigators later reviewed video and concluded the handling was more forceful than Perkins described. The records say the footage showed him increasing the intensity of his grip as he moved the boy and that he appeared to push the child from behind as he entered the classroom.

The documents also say staff believed the student was choking, while Perkins said he attempted the Heimlich maneuver. The child had a history of choking concerns, according to the records, and officers later believed Perkins left out key details in his statement.

The death is drawing intense scrutiny because it unfolded inside a Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District facility meant for vulnerable students who need close supervision. CFISD says it is Texas’s third-largest school district, serving nearly 118,000 students across 96 schools in northwest Harris County. Carlton Center is the district’s campus for pre-vocational programming, a setting where staff are expected to manage medical, behavioral and mobility needs with care.

The case also lands in the middle of a broader Texas debate over restraint and disability protections. State guidance limits physical restraint to emergency situations involving immediate danger and requires the force used to be the minimum necessary and to stop when the emergency ends. Disability Rights Texas has said students with disabilities are restrained far more often than their non-disabled peers, and a Texas policy brief has pointed to the 2021 death of a Fort Worth student with autism after a face-down restraint.

For Harris County families, the questions now go beyond one arrest. They reach into how school systems verify what happened when a child cannot speak for himself, how quickly staff summon medical help, and whether the people assigned to protect medically and behaviorally vulnerable students are trained to do so safely.